Lewes History Group

Please note: this Bulletin is being put on the website one month after publication. Alternatively you can receive the Bulletin by email as soon as it is published, by becoming a member of the Lewes History Group, and renewing your membership annually

1.     Next Meeting: 9 February 2026: three members’ short talks
2.     Judith Brent
3.     Dates of Lewes Floods
4.     Coombe House Antiques, Malling Street
5.    A portrait of Margaret Woods
6.     John Braden: our first Medical Officer of Health (by Chris Taylor)
7.     A felony at Malling
8.     Lewes Castle painted by Mary Webster in 1838
9.     The mail must get through
10.   Two way traffic on School Hill

1.    Next Meeting        7.30 p.m.         Zoom Meeting     Monday 9 February
Sheila Wood             ‘What’s in a name?’
Paul Nicoll                 ‘How the Lewes By-pass saved the Rugby Club’ 
Chris Taylor            ‘A Doctor in Edwardian Lewes’ [John Steinhaeuser]

This month’s meeting will again feature three shorter talks by members on their research into three different aspects of Lewes history. Sheila Wood will speak about the names given by residents to the houses in the developing Wallands area of Lewes a century or so ago, and the problems they caused for the authorities. Paul Nicoll will cover an aspect of the history of the Lewes Rugby Club and then Chris Taylor will tell us about the life and career of Dr John Steinhaeuser, who used his professional skills to help make Lewes a safer place to live.

LHG members will receive the Zoom link for the meeting.
Non-members can attend via Ticketsource.co.uk/lhg (price £4.00).

In our recent survey over 70% of members supported continuing with zoom meetings in the winter months.

2.      Judith Brent

I am very sorry to have to record the sudden death on New Year’s Eve of Judith Brent, formerly an archivist with the East Sussex Record Office, going back to the days when our county’s archives were housed in cupboards on the upper floors of Pelham House. Judith and her husband Colin devoted much of their lives to unravelling the history of our county, and in particular its county town. Their house-by-house history of Lewes, Cliffe and Southover is an invaluable guide for much of the research our own group has carried out, in particular the various Street Stories projects.

I have a particular personal debt to Colin & Judy. Some 50 years ago Colin ran a Local History evening class under the auspices of the Workers Educational Association – at a time when local history was a barely respectable endeavour. Judy joined in, and we were able to initiate our own research projects, with access to the original documents unimaginable today. I was one of the students and so began a life-long fascination with the subject.

3.      Dates of Lewes Floods

The 14 November 2025 Sussex Express reported, on the authority of John Gower, flood lead for the Friends of Lewes, that properties in the town had been affected by flooding in 2000, 1960, 1938, 1911, 1909 and 1878. I have been unable to find reports of the 1938 & 1878 floods in the local press, though 1877 saw serious flooding in the brooks around the town. The other dates are well-attested and we have photographs from 1909, 1911, 1960 and 2000. In addition the 28 October 1891 Hastings & Bexhill Observer reports flooding on both sides of the river Ouse in the lower parts of the town.

To these floods we can add a report in the 7 November 1865 Sussex Advertiser of flooding affecting the lower parts of the town, especially the Cliffe, that was as bad as had been experienced in the great floods of 1852, when serious flooding in Lewes was reported in newspapers published across England. The 1852 floods were described as the worst since 1814, but at least the paper mill, the riverside wharves and the cellars of the Cliffe were also flooded in 1841. Peter Varlow’s new book on Cliffe church mentions the 1814 flood as caused by rapid melting of snow. Brigid Chapman in ‘The Chronicles of Cliffe and South Malling’ (2003) also reports floods in 1773,1772 and 1768 [Bulletin no.45].

On at least two other occasions in the 20^th century (1914 & 1935) there was flooding of dozens of houses in Southover by the Winterbourne without any accompanying flooding from the Ouse.

4.      Coombe House Antiques, Malling Street

This trade advertisement for Coombe House Antiques, Malling Street, is taken from the 1968 edition of Kelly’s Directory for Lewes. This was once a very smart villa residence.

5.      A portrait of Margaret Woods

This oil on board portrait, noted on the reverse to be of Margaret Woods of Lewes, spinster, 1778-1868, was offered for sale on ebay recently for £175 by Plardiwick Antiques of Stafford.

The 1851 and 1861 censuses find her living, together with her unmarried brother Joseph Woods, in one of the houses of Priory Crescent, Southover. They were prominent members of the Lewes Quaker community. Joseph & Margaret Woods both died at Priory Crescent, in January 1864 and December 1868 respectively, and they were buried side by side in the Quaker Burial Ground in Friars Walk. Though Joseph Woods was regarded in his lifetime as of delicate health, they lived to the ages of 87 and 90 respectively. They are both described as annuitants in the 1851 census and Joseph was a ‘fundholder’ in 1861. At Margaret Woods’ death she left an estate of £6,000, so they could afford to live comfortably.

Joseph and Margaret Woods were respectively the third and fourth children of Joseph Woods senior (1738-1812), a widely educated Quaker woollen-draper, and his wife Margaret Hoare (1748-1821). They were born in Stoke Newington, then a village a few miles to the north of London. In 1787, when they were both just children, their father and their uncle, the banker Samuel Hoare, were two of the five Quaker founders of the London Association against Slavery, the predecessor to the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Their mother kept a journal from 1771 until her death from which extracts, published posthumously in both Britain and the United States, are today a major source for contemporary Quaker social history. 

Joseph Woods, largely self-educated, trained as an architect. Although he does not seem to have had any great talent for the practical side of the business, he became the founder and first president of the London Architectural Society in 1806. After Waterloo he was able to travel extensively in France, Italy and Greece, and published ‘Letters of an Architect’ in 1828. However, he had wide interests that extended into other areas, becoming a Fellow of both the Geological Society and the Linnean Society, and a member of the Society of Antiquaries. After giving up architecture, he moved to Lewes in the early 1830s. Thereafter he focused much more on his botanical studies. He was a particular specialist in roses. He published widely in this field, including  in 1850 a Flora of Great Britain and the parts of Europe in which he had travelled. The Linnean society has a collection of his manuscripts and journals. He was also a competent amateur artist, though his surviving artworks are few and far between. He was an excellent chess player.

Margaret Woods was herself a talented artist, and the Linnean Society has a volume of her intricate watercolours of flowers from her garden and from the places she visited in and around London. Each drawing is carefully documented, and a selection are featured on the Society’s website. They were drawn from 1802 onwards, for the benefit of her brother’s botanical work. Margaret’s portrait is unsigned. It appears to date from the time they lived in Lewes. It could perhaps be a self-portrait, a painting by her brother or the work of a contemporary Lewes artist.

Sources: FindMyPast; M.A. Lower, ‘The Worthies of Sussex’ (1865); David Hitchin, ‘Quakers in Lewes’ (2010); Linnean Society website; obituary of Joseph Woods in the 20 January 1864 Sussex Advertiser; the drawing of Joseph Woods by John Cotman is from the V&A Museum collection and the photograph from the Linnean Society website.

6.      John Braden: our first Medical Officer of Health     (by Chris Taylor)

The Public Health Act of 1872 created local sanitary authorities to oversee services such as water supply, sewerage and refuse disposal in every part of England and Wales. The Act obliged each authority to appoint a medical officer of health (MoH) to advise, give direction and prepare annual reports on the sanitary state of the district, the incidence of diseases and the rate of infant mortality. It was decided to make a single appointment to cover Lewes, Cliffe and the rural districts; in 1873 Lewes doctor John Braden became the first MoH with a salary of £50 a year.

John George Braden was born in Whitechapel in 1836, the son of a sugar refiner with premises in Denmark Street. The 1851 census has John, aged 15, living at an address in Brick Lane, ‘learning his profession’ as an apprentice to the surgeon Thomas Mears. Apprenticeship was a common means of preparation for medical practice before a structured system of hospital-based training and standardised examinations were developed. Braden completed his successfully and was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1857. He set up in general practice in the Commercial Road area of London and in 1861 married Louisa Kennedy. The 1871 census has John and Louisa living at 166 High Street, Lewes (formerly the premises of Gideon Mantell) with daughter Mary aged 9, son Carl aged 5, baby Ethel and three servants. Carl had been born in Torquay, so it is possible that Braden practised there for a while before arriving in Lewes.

Braden’s annual reports demonstrate his strong commitment to public health awareness, a shrewd appreciation of the practicalities of public health measures and at times a dry wit. His time in office saw the extension of sewerage to most parts of the town and the near-elimination of cesspools. Throughout the 1880s he noted with approval the public’s increasing interest in sanitary matters. In 1888 he reported that ‘all classes are beginning fully to understand it is better to prevent than cure disease.’ He hoped, however, that this growing awareness would not encourage people to think that ‘almost every act in their daily life is fraught with sanitary danger’: reason should prevail.

His calm handling of a severe outbreak of enteric fever (typhoid) in 1874-5 earned Braden a vote of thanks from the Improvement Commissioners, who were until 1881 the sanitary authority for Lewes Borough. This outbreak supplied him with ammunition to argue for an isolation hospital for infectious diseases in Lewes, which duly opened in 1877. Braden’s riposte in 1882 to ratepayers who complained that the new hospital’s beds had so far been largely unoccupied was to suggest that ‘probably the same individuals would regret the inactivity of the fire engine’.

Braden became a well-known figure in the town. A stalwart of the local Conservative Association – one imagines him an enthusiastic supporter of Disraeli’s Sanitas Sanitatum, Omnia Sanitas dictum – and a vice president of the Lewes Cyclist Club, he found time to serve as president of the Lewes Photographic Society. The Sussex Express reported in April 1891 on ‘An enjoyable entertainment … given at St. Anne’s School-room on Wednesday evening by Dr. J. G. Braden’s exhibition of Sussex photographs… The frequent applause which greeted the views, which embraced a variety of subjects, indicated the keen appreciation of the audience.’

John Braden’s tenure as Lewes MoH came to rather an abrupt end in June 1892 when, after 20 years in office, he tendered his resignation. A combination of reasons probably explain his decision. Personal tragedy possibly played a part: Louisa had died in 1888 and three of their five children had died in infancy. A serious flu epidemic in 1892, which killed 47 people in January alone, caused him great distress: ‘l regret not being able to speak so favourably as usual on the general health of the town.’ The death rate in the first half of that year rose to 22.2 per 1000, the highest in 20 years and, very unusually, considerably above the national rate. Against this background, the Borough Council received a letter of complaint from Sir George Shiffner, Rector of Hamsey, accusing Braden of neglect in the case of a parishioner, to whom he had failed to make an arranged second visit and who had died. This was the first complaint ever made against him. Braden’s reply, endorsed by the council’s sanitary committee, denied any neglect and explained the difficult circumstances that had doctors working at full stretch. All these factors no doubt contributed to a degree of disillusion and prompted his departure.

The council having accepted his resignation with regret, Braden left Lewes with ringing endorsements of his work, including one from the Directors of the Victoria Hospital, expressing their high appreciation of his services as an honorary surgeon. He continued to practise for a few years at St Margarets at Cliff near Dover, where he was elected to the parish council. He left there in 1895, moving to Shalford in Surrey, where he died aged 70 in 1906.

Sources: Records of Lewes Improvement Commissioners (ESBHRO LEW/C/3/1); Sanitary Committee minutes (ESBHRO DL/D/169); Censuses 1841-1891; UK Medical Registers 1859-1959; 18 April 1891 Sussex Express; 7 December 1894 & 25 October 1895 Dover Express

7.      A felony at Malling

The 15 March 1864 Sussex Advertiser reported that Hannah Carter, a respectable-looking woman who earned her living by hawking baby linen, etc, was brought before the Lewes bench charged with stealing a chemise and a night gown from a washing line in ‘the parish of Cliffe, Malling’. They were valued at three shillings and the property of Edward Ford.

Mary Ford, the prosecutor’s wife, deposed to missing the items in question on 7 March about 5 p.m., and she identified items shown to her as those that had gone missing. A label had been cut out. Her neighbour gave evidence that she had seen the prisoner nearby at the time. P.C. Gosden recovered the missing items in Hannah Carter’s possession at the Welcome Stranger at about 7 p.m. the same evening.

Hannah Carter claimed she had bought the items for a shilling from a woman she could ‘identify among a thousand’, but she was not believed. The bench sentenced her to six weeks’ hard labour

8.      Lewes Castle painted by Mary Webster in 1838

Recently offered on ebay by Jacob Boston Fine Art was this fine signed and titled watercolour of the view inside the castle keep by Mary Webster (1794-1883). She adds a note ‘Sketched from nature, 25 August 1838’. Also offered by the same artist are about forty other views of Pevensey Castle, Herstmonceux Castle, Hastings Castle, Ashburnham Park, Priesthawes House near Hailsham, Ovingdean & Preston churches, the Royal Pavilion, the Downs near Brighton and a number of views in and around Eastbourne. The majority are from Sussex or from Broadstairs in Kent, but there are also a number from other counties. Each is titled, signed and dated. The Lewes Castle painting, offered at £250, is roughly A4 size.

Mary Webster does not appear in the catalogues of exhibiting Victorian artists, but she seems to have been a talented and prolific amateur. Three albums of her watercolours painted between 1838 & 1850 were sold by the auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull for £6,300 in June 2025, and these watercolours come from them. The Lyon & Turnbull catalogue includes a brief biography.

Mary Webster was the eldest of 11 children born to John Webster, minister at Inverarity, near Dundee, and his wife, also Mary. After John’s death in 1807 the family moved to London. They appear to have continued to live together. The address that Mary provides in one album, 24 Brook Street, was also the address of her eminent brother John Webster MD FRCP FRS (1794-1876), who devoted much time and labour to the examination of lunatic asylums, prisons, and medical institutions at home and abroad’ [Royal College of Physicians, online]. A collection of Mary’s watercolours is held by Edinburgh Libraries, who remark that ‘the census records indicate that Mary was a lady of independent means, single, living in a household with her mother and grown-up siblings with servants’. This would support the evidence that she was able to travel widely and pursue her painting pastime. She was described in her family as a woman who was talented, travelled widely, and wrote and painted ‘en plein air’. The albums were consigned to auction by a family member.  

9.      The mail must get through

In the early hours of a dark November Friday morning in 1873 the Hawkhurst mail cart, scheduled to arrive at Lewes at ten minutes past five, was galloping down the Broyle when it collided with one of the timber waggons belonging to Messrs Chatfield of Lewes, also on the road at that early hour. It was the lighter mail cart that came off worse – its body was detached from its wheels, and it was completely disabled.

Luckily neither Cootes, the driver, nor his horse suffered serious injury. He extracted his bags of letters and papers from the stricken vehicle, slung them about his body, mounted his steed and completed his journey to Lewes as fast as he could. He arrived at his depot at ten past six, just an hour late.                                                         

Source: 28 November 1873 Hastings & Bexhill Independent

10.    Two way traffic on School Hill There is no date attached to this photograph showing two-way traffic on School Hill, but the vehicles and the pedestrians’ attire suggest somewhere about 1950. The Cinema de Luxe, the Lewes Trustee Savings Bank and F.H. Coote, gents’ outfitters, at 25-28 High Street all match the entries in my 1951 local directory. The Seveirg building stands on the corner of Eastgate Street, and the Uckfield Railway line still crosses the High Street.

John Kay                                   01273 813388                         johnkay56@gmail.com

Contact details for Friends of the Lewes History Group promoting local historical events
Sussex Archaeological Society:  http://sussexpast.co.uk/events
Lewes Priory Trust:  http://www.lewespriory.org.uk/news-listing
Lewes Archaeological group:  http://lewesarchaeology.org.uk and go to ‘Lectures’
Friends of Lewes:  http://friends-of-lewes.org.uk/diary/
Lewes Priory School Memorial Chapel Trust:  https://www.lewesprioryschoolmemorialchapeltrust.org/

Facebook:   https://www.facebook.com/LewesHistoryGroup            
Twitter (X):   https://twitter.com/LewesHistory

Please note: this Bulletin is being put on the website one month after publication. Alternatively you can receive the Bulletin by email as soon as it is published, by becoming a member of the Lewes History Group, and renewing your membership annually

1.     Next Meeting: 12 January 2026: Chris Hare, ‘Richard Jefferies: a man out of time’
2.     A.G.M. Report
3.     A great fall of Chalk
4.     Steere’s Charity
5.    A well-travelled postcard of Southover Church
6.     Ouse abuse (by Chris Taylor)
7.     Merging the Lewes and Chailey Poor Law Unions
8.     Treasurer’s Final Report for 2024/5 (by Phil Green)

1.    Next Meeting           7.30 p.m.         Zoom Meeting     Monday 12 January
       Chris Hare                    Richard Jefferies: a man out of time

Historian Chris Hare will be speaking about the life and work of the naturalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, a remarkable man who spent his final years living in Sussex, documenting the life of the county, and especially life on the Sussex Dowland, in the 1880s.

Members can register without charge to receive a Zoom access link for the event.
Non-members can attend via Ticketsource.co.uk/lhg (price £4.00).
In our recent survey over 70% of members supported continuing with zoom meetings in the winter months.

2.      A.G.M. Report

1. The Annual Reports published in Bulletin no.185 were approved.
2. Appointment of officers. The following officers were appointed:
   (a) Chair: Ian McClelland (also ‘Street Stories’ lead)
   (b) Treasurer: Phil Green
   (c) Secretary: Krystyna Weinstein
   (d) Executive committee: Ann Holmes (Chair for EC meetings), John Kay (Bulletin editor), Bill Kocher & Paul Yates (Website managers) & Chris Taylor (Membership)
3. Membership subscription. It was agreed that the annual subscription should remain at £10 p.a. per member, and that admission to evening meetings should be free for members. Admissions charges for non-members should remain at £4 per meeting.
4. There were no AOB items.

3.      A great fall of Chalk About eight o’clock on Saturday night early in 1805 several persons in Lewes were alarmed by a strange rattling noise in the air, which they were totally unable to account for until the following morning, when it appeared that the noise was occasioned by an immense fall of chalk, in the pit belonging to Mr Hillman in South Street, Cliffe. It is extraordinary that the noise was scarcely  noticed by persons living in the neighbourhood of the pit, although the fall is estimated at six thousand tons weight. It was productive of no damage whatever, as it fortunately happened at a time when the men had all left their work.                        

Source: 14 January 1805 Hampshire Chronicle

4.      Steere’s Charity

Inserted into the Lewes Town Book, between the records of the law days held in the autumn of 1661 and 1662, is a page recording the establishment of Steere’s Charity under the 1 November 1661 will of George Steere of Newdigate in Surrey, clerk. His will had been made when he was in indifferent health, but he added a codicil on 3 June 1662, a week before his death. He was buried at Newdigate three days later. By his will he left the houses that he owned in Lewes, occupied by “one Legate, Peter Ray, Widow Braines and Widow Mote”, to the inhabitants of the town of Lewes. They were to pay an annuity of £4 p.a. to Rev George Steere’s widow Sarah and another annuity of £2 p.a. to Thomas Holmewood, the son of his “loving kinsman” Edward Holmewood of Lewes, but the residue of the income (and the entire income after their deaths) was left to support the maintenance of “one fitt person the sonne of godly poor parents in or neare to the sayd Towne of Lewes” for four years while they attended the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge. The income was then to be paid to one candidate after another, each for a four year period. He expressed a preference for the recipient to be “a sonne of a godly poore minister who hath truly laboured & endeavoured to wynne soules unto Jesus Christ”.

Steere’s Exhibition continued to enable young men from Lewes and its neighbourhood to attend Oxford and Cambridge colleges for more than two hundred years, until after the establishment of the Borough in 1881 it was combined with other town charities that also had educational aims. One of the houses that provided this income was Castle Hill House, 76 High Street, featured in Bulletin no.183, which George Steere had owned since at least 1624, and with which Edward Holmwood, draper, was also associated. The other three houses were nearby on the west side of St Martin’s Lane, very probably built on what had been the garden of this same property. Such charities, often established by clergymen who had themselves benefitted from a charity-sponsored education, were not uncommon in the colleges of the older universities – many years ago I was myself a beneficiary. However, this one raises some intriguing questions, most notably why the long-serving rector of a Surrey parish should establish a charity whose beneficiaries were to be the young men of the Lewes area.

As is often the case for people born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the biographical information available about George Steere is incomplete. Venn’s ‘Alumni Cantabrigiensis’ is unusually tentative. It records that he was admitted as a sizar to Queen’s College at Easter 1600, but perhaps previously to Trinity College in June 1599, and that he came from Suffolk, probably from the parish of Bures St Mary. Sizar’s received financial help from their college in return for performing some menial duties, so we can conclude that he was probably born in the early 1580s and that he was more likely an academically-able young man from a modest social background than a scion of a wealthy family. He graduated with a BA degree about 1602-3 and was awarded his MA at a date after 1606. Venn also notes that he married twice (but gives an incorrect date for the death of his first wife) and that he was rector of Newdigate from 1610-1656 (the second date also apparently incorrect). He notes that there are two secondary biographical sources available, one published in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, but questions their accuracy.

Steere’s entry in the online Clergy of the Church of England Database also lacks information about his university career and his ordination, but does provide some information about his career between his graduation and his gaining his rectory. It records that on 23 October 1604 George Steere BA was licensed as both curate and schoolmaster at Chailey, with permission to serve as a schoolmaster anywhere in the Archdeaconry of Lewes. A second record dated 2 January 1607 marks his being appointed as sequestrator of Southover church, which was at that time served by a curate. The exact nature of his duties is not entirely clear, but it seems that he was at this time resident in the Lewes area. Then on 20 March 1610/1, now qualified by an MA, he was instituted as Rector of Newdigate in Surrey, a crown rectory.

He promptly took up his duties in Newdigate, and resided in that parish for more than half a century until his death in 1662. The parish registers are consistently completed in his distinctive hand from 1611 until 1660. The first section of his 1661 will, which was also written in his own hand, proclaims clear Puritan views:

 “First and before all other things I comitt my soule into the hands of Almighty God my creator steadfastly trusting in the exceeding abundance of the uses of his free grace and tender murcie to bee saved through the alsufficient merritts of the active and passive obedience of my most blessed Lord and only saviour Jesus Christ”.

He remained in post undisturbed throughout the Civil War and the period of Cromwell’s rule. It isn’t clear why he ceased to fulfil his role in person for the last two years of his life. Did he, in his late seventies, simply require assistance or was he was displaced at the Restoration? After 1611 he is always described as of Newdigate, and he appears as a witness to the wills of several of his parishioners there, including nuncupative wills declared by a testator on his deathbed and written down later by the witnesses. His own will shows him as living in his own house in the parish.

Just a few weeks after his arrival in Newdigate he married Joan Smallpeece, the daughter of a yeoman farmer with a substantial estate in that parish and other surrounding parishes. The marriage took place at St Saviour’s church, Southwark, but George Steere recorded the event in his own parish registers too. The Victoria County History of Surrey notes that in 1614 he repaired and ceiled the chancel of Newdigate church at his own expense, and that in 1627 he contributed to two new windows there. This and the acquisition of his Lewes property suggests that he was now a man of some means, perhaps from his clerical income or perhaps from a dowry brought into the marriage by his wife. His will shows that by his death he owned property in Newdigate and Dorking as well as in Lewes. His wife’s father died in 1626 and her mother in 1632. Both their will’s mention their married daughters Joan Steere and her married sister Catherine Constable, but leave them only modest bequests. The great majority of the Smallpeece estate went to their eldest brother, the new head of the family. Her mother named Joan and her sister, rather than any of the menfolk of the family, as her executor. Joan the wife of George Steere, parson of Newdigate, was also the executor and residuary heir in the will of a family retainer who also died in 1632.

Then in December 1634 Joan Steere herself died. George Steere recorded her burial in the Newdigate registers, describing her first as her father’s daughter, and only secondarily as his wife. He distinguished her burial from the others he recorded that year by writing it in Latin.

He also erected a plaque to her memory on the chancel wall, that still survives:

HERE LIETH YE BODY OF IOANE DAVGHTER OF THOMAS SMALLPEECE
& LATE YE WIFE OF GEORGE STEERE PARSON OF THIS PARISH
SHEE DIED DEC: 7 AN: DOM: 1634 & EXPECTETH A BLESSED RESVRECTION.

This Calvinist confidence in the resurrection of the elect was shared by her yeoman father, who in his 1626 will declared himself ‘one of the Elect of God’.

Four and a half years later George Steere married again. His new wife was Sarah Bristow, the widow of the rector of the adjacent parish of Charlwood, who had died a little under two years previously. This second marriage took place in Lindfield, Sussex, but again George Steere included a record of the event in the Newdigate marriage register too. Sarah Bristow had been only modestly provided for by her husband. Her husband in his will, written shortly before his death, evidently entertained the hope that she might be pregnant, but if not most of his lands in Charlwood and Horley were to be distributed amongst his family, with Sarah, who he made his sole executor, to receive only their household goods, 36 acres of tenanted land and “the English books she wants”. Sarah Steere was to survive her second husband, and she was his executor too when he died in 1662. She was doubtless already well-versed in the duties of a clergyman’s wife, and in 1655 she appears, alongside her husband, as a witness to the nuncupative will of a Newdigate yeoman.

George Steere had no children by either of his wives, so when he came to the end of his long life he was able to distribute his worldly resources to such recipients as he chose. He of course made decent provision for his wife, mainly by means of annuities charged on the properties he bequeathed for charitable purposes, and he left modest bequests to a long list of other relatives and friends. However, most of his estate was used to develop three new charities, all educational in nature, and perhaps reflecting older charities that had enabled him to pursue his own career. Two were to benefit Newdigate, and both of these had been established within his own lifetime. The third was to benefit Lewes, where he had started his clerical career.

Each of the three charities George Steere created was to operate in a different way. The first one listed in his will gave a small piece of land belonging his own house on which he had built a schoolhouse to the inhabitants of the parish of Newdigate, on condition that they keep it in good repair. His house and the rest of its land was bequeathed to his second wife Sarah for her lifetime, and thereafter to members of her family, subject to a requirement that the owner paid £6 13s 4d every year to cover the education at the school of four young boys “of godly poore parents”. The school received additional endowments, and has been both rebuilt and relocated, but survives to this day as the Newdigate Church of England Endowed Infant School. Can it possibly be a coincidence that Sarah Steere’s first husband, Rev John Bristow, had also built a similar school in his own neighbouring parish of Charlwood during his lifetime, and that he too by his will had endowed it with a piece of land that he owned so that three poor children should be educated there without payment?

The second charity mentioned was the Lewes one, where his property in the town was gifted to the inhabitants to maintain a poor student from the town or its surrounding rural area at a college of their choice at either Oxford or Cambridge. The third was similar in principle, but quite different in the way that it worked. George Steere had purchased a Dorking property, and from its annual rents was already supporting the maintenance of a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. This property he bequeathed to members of his own family, but they were to pay all the rents received to his wife Sarah for her lifetime, and out of that she was to pay £12 p.a. to the student at Trinity College. When this student completed his studies, the Exhibition at Trinity was to continue, now reduced to £10 p.a. and limited to a maximum tenure of 4 years. The successive beneficiaries were to be young men from Newdigate or the surrounding area, chosen by the ministers of Newdigate, Dorking and Ockley in Surrey and the minister of Rusper in Sussex.

Sources: L.F. Salzman, ‘The Town Book of Lewes, 1542-1701’, pp.86-87; Colin Brent’s Lewes House Histories; J. Venn, ‘Alumni Cantabrigiensis’, available at https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/; Clergy of the Church of England Database, available at https://theclergydatabase.org.uk/; FindMyPast; Newdigate & Charlwood sections of the Exploring Surrey’s Past website & Victoria County History of Surrey; ESRO SAS/BB 23; George Steere’s will is TNA PROB 11/308/645; John Bristow’s will is TNA PROB 11/174/531; The website of the Newdigate Local History Society contains several views of George Steere’s house in Newdigate.

5.            A well-travelled postcard of Southover Church

This postcard featuring Southover church by an anonymous publisher, offered for sale recently on ebay, was sent from one end of France to the other to mark the arrival of the New Year 1905.

6.      Ouse abuse                                                             (by Chris Taylor)

Anxiety about discharge from sewers into the River Ouse is not new. There was no sewerage in Lewes until the second half of the 19th century. Before then, cesspools, requiring frequent emptying, were the means of dealing with human waste, with much of it ending up in the river. The Sanitary Act of 1866 obliged local authorities to provide sewerage systems, in response to which the town’s Improvement Commissioners installed the first sewer in the High Street, at the same time as Bazalgette was famously and similarly engaged in London. The Borough Council extended it to include St Anne’s in 1888 and in 1891 Arthur Holt, the Borough Surveyor, devised a comprehensive system to encompass the whole town. The scheme was implemented in stages: Paddock Valley in 1893, Southover in 1895 and Cliffe in the early 1900s. All these sewers were designed, via a series of outfalls at intervals along its banks, to discharge raw sewage into the Ouse.

The Cliffe was left until last because its flat topography inhibited the fall required for efficient sewerage. Replacing the ancient culverts, installed originally to deal with flood water, proved expensive. The council’s scheme involved installing two electrically-powered pumps – Shone Ejectors, placed at the entrance to Newington’s coal merchants’ wharf in South Street – to lift the sewage to an outfall into the river near the gasometer. To pay for it the council had to approach central government – the Local Government Board (LGB) –  for approval to borrow £7000.

The County Council objected to the loan. Responding to complaints from neighbouring local authorities, Dr Foulerton (sic), the Medical Officer of Heath for East Sussex, reported in July 1903 that the discharge of sewage at Lewes was the likeliest cause of the recent prevalence of typhoid fever downstream in Newhaven and Piddinghoe. The County Council applied to the LGB for an order declaring the Ouse from Barcombe Mills to Glynde Reach to be a ‘stream’ within the meaning of the Rivers Pollution Acts of 1876 and 1893, which would make the discharge of solid waste into it illegal.

The County Council put its case to LGB inspectors at a three-day inquiry into the matter in October 1904. The Borough Council conducted a vigorous defence, arguing that the prevalence of typhoid at Newhaven could not in any way be attributed to the pollution of the Ouse by sewage from Lewes:

• there had been no outbreak of typhoid in Lewes itself
• Newhaven had been unaffected by the last severe typhoid epidemic in Lewes in 1873-75, so river pollution could not have been to blame 
• sewage from Brighton (population 160,000), routinely discharged into the sea 2 ½ miles west of Newhaven harbour, was a far more likely source of infection, a factor not considered in Foulerton’s report. 

The inspectors dismissed the County Council’s application. But their report insisted that the Borough promptly take remedial measures to eliminate ‘the highly objectionable and possibly dangerous condition of the river in the neighbourhood of Lewes, occasioned by the discharge of crude sewage.’

Faced with the need to improve the condition of the river, the council proposed a different approach. All the town’s sewers were to be diverted via new intercepting pipes to a central point, where the sewage would be screened and pass through sedimentation settling tanks. It would then be discharged into the river, at ebb tide only, through a single outfall situated a little below the mouth of the Cockshut at Southerham. Connecting the existing main sewers, building several new tributary sewers and buying the 19 acres of land for the outfall works would require permission from the LGB to raise another loan, this time of about £18,000.

Dr Foulerton was not impressed. The County Council objected once again on the grounds that the scheme contained no plan for the proper purification of the sewage. The sedimentation tanks, they argued, would remove no more than 50% of the solids, with the rest destined to enter the river. It was not possible for the town’s waste to be taken the seven miles to the sea on one tide: it would inevitably be carried back and forth, with much of it deposited on the river banks, presenting a high danger of infection.

Consequently the LGB held another inquiry in October 1909, at which the Borough Council stressed the degree of improvement the new scheme would deliver. The screening, the sedimentation and the sluicing in the tidal storage reservoirs, would mean that the condition of the effluent reaching the river would ‘leave little to be desired.’ No current method of purification was capable, they claimed, of rendering sewage entirely harmless to health. Rather than spend a lot more money on sewage treatment works with no guarantee that the resulting effluent would be free of disease, it would be better to persist with the planned scheme, monitor its effects and concentrate on improving the drainage system across the town, where there were still old sewers requiring replacement.

Again, much to the surprise of many at the forefront of work in sanitation, the LGB approved the loan and the scheme went ahead. Large quantities of raw sewage continued to be routinely discharged into the Ouse until biological purification processes, filtration and disinfection were adopted later in the century and the outfall site became Lewes Sewage Works.

Sources: Public Inquiries into pollution of the Ouse, 1904, 1909 (ESBHRO: NRA/12/2 and c/c/74/1/21); Lewes Borough Council Sanitary Committee minutes (ESBHRO: DL/D/169/5); Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute Dec. 1912 (ESBHRO: AMS6042/1); East Sussex News 5 November 1909; CIBSE Heritage Group website (Shone Ejector image).

7.      Merging the Lewes and Chailey Poor Law Unions

In November 1897 there was a public meeting at Newick to discuss the Local Government Board proposal that the Chailey Poor Law Union and some parishes belonging to the West Firle Union should be amalgamated with the Lewes Union. Newick residents were opposed to the change, but in March 1898 the proposals went ahead anyway. Two months later there was a large increase in the poor rates that Newick residents had to pay.

Thereafter the Lewes Union Workhouse in St Anne’s parish was closed, with its residents moved to spare capacity at the Chailey Union workhouse built in 1873 on the southern end of Chailey Common (in East Chiltington parish). The poorest Lewes residents were thereby moved further out of sight and out of mind.

Source: Tony Turk, ‘A Victorian Diary of Newick, Sussex, 1875-1899’. The same parishes of the Chailey & West Firle Unions remain part of Lewes District Council today.

8.      Treasurer’s Final Report for 2024/5                       (by Phil Green)

John Kay                                   01273 813388                         johnkay56@gmail.com

Contact details for Friends of the Lewes History Group promoting local historical events
Sussex Archaeological Society:  http://sussexpast.co.uk/events
Lewes Priory Trust:  http://www.lewespriory.org.uk/news-listing
Lewes Archaeological group:  http://lewesarchaeology.org.uk and go to ‘Lectures’
Friends of Lewes:  http://friends-of-lewes.org.uk/diary/
Lewes Priory School Memorial Chapel Trust:  https://www.lewesprioryschoolmemorialchapeltrust.org/

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